TechSmith Relay (Self-Hosted): Important TechSmith Relay Concepts

Before you configure TechSmith Relay, there are several concepts you should be familiar with. Please review the following topics.

Profiles

Profiles are the backbone of TechSmith Relay. They allow presenters to record or upload media without having to make any decisions about how the content is processed or where it is placed for viewing.

Profiles are created by the administrator and include settings that define how the content is captured, processed, and published. Careful consideration of how you want to set up your organization’s profiles helps simplify maintenance of the profiles over time.

Things to consider:

You may want to first create a test profile to make sure that you understand the parts of the profile and some of the options available to ease day to day maintenance, such as variables.

The profile title is the only thing presenters can see in the TechSmith Relay Recorder. The profile description is only visible on the website. Consider carefully how you choose profile titles so that they convey their intended use to presenters.

The Upload and Decide Later Profile uploads media to the TechSmith Relay server, but does not process it. The uploaded content stays in the Needs Attention state on the server until an administrator or the presenter selects a profile to use or deletes it.

Variables

Variables can help simplify the management of profiles, publish destinations, publish accounts, and notifications. These “placeholders” have a value applied to them at the time a presentation processes.

There are administrator-defined and system-defined variables available:

Administrator-defined variables

Create a variable, use the variable in multiple places, and manage the value in central location.

For example, you can create a global variable for Semester, add it to a file system publish destination path and use the publish destination for multiple profiles. When the semester is over, you change the value once, and the publish destinations paths are automatically adjusted to reflect the change.

System-defined variables

These variables are included in the TechSmith Relay system and change based on the information for the presentation that is being processed.

For example, you can use the system variable for the presenter’s username in a publish destination file path such as \\media.company.com\presentations\{s:PresenterUserName}. When the presentation is published, the presenter’s username is substituted in the file path and places the presentation in that presenter’s network folder.

Administrators Cannot Record Presentations

Administrators cannot make recordings or log in to the TechSmith Relay Recorder.

To record or upload media using the TechSmith Relay Recorder, you must create a presenter account. The presenter account cannot have the same email address as the administrator account.

If you are using LDAP, instead of creating a new user in LDAP, create a new user on the TechSmith Relay website. See Manually Add Users to TechSmith Relay for more information about how to create a new user.

TechSmith Relay Recorder

There are a few ways to access the recorder:

Administrators and presenters can download the TechSmith Relay Recorder from the TechSmith Relay website.

Administrators can also obtain the files at:

{base URL}/Relay/Downloads/WinTechSmithRelay.exe (Windows)

{base URL}/Relay/Downloads/MacTechSmithRelay.zip (Mac)

{base URL}/Relay/Downloads/PortableTechSmithRelay.zip (Portable)

Note: The server URL is hard coded into the recorder. If you have multiple instances of TechSmith Relay in your organization and are distributing the files to presenters make sure presenters are installing recorders from the correct server instances.

In a locked-down or controlled environment, the administrator can choose to deploy the TechSmith Relay Recorder for Windows operating systems instead of having the users download it from the TechSmith Relay website.